The GOP’s post-Cantor immigration headache

Suddenly, the 2016 Republican field has a new reason to worry about immigration reform: saying anything at all can be hazardous to your presidential chances.

The advice to the Republican Party seemed so clear after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012: Just do it. Get some kind of immigration reform deal — the least bad deal you can find — and then move on. Otherwise, you can forget about winning any Hispanic voters.

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Cantor endorses McCarthy for majority leader

Full Eric Cantor statement

But Eric Cantor’s loss Tuesday night proved how difficult a messaging challenge the issue will be for any 2016 candidate who dares to touch the rail. Advocate — even a little bit — for a deal, and you risk the ire of the base and being tagged as a supporter of “amnesty.” Go too far the other way, and you’ll surely face trouble in November against the Democrats.

The political earthquake immediately affects potential 2016 candidates out front on immigration reform such as Sen. Marco Rubio — who joined the Senate bipartisan push for immigration reform and then went quiet on it — and Jeb Bush, who raised eyebrows when he said in April that some illegal immigration is an “act of love” for immigrants’ families. But it could also become a headache for other hopefuls, like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who’s building his potential campaign around his ability to expand the appeal of the party.

So far, Republicans leading the pack on immigration reform train aren’t backing off. They’re finding reasons to stay on board. Doing nothing is not an option, they say. And on Wednesday, they pointed to the example of South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who was a much more vocal advocate of immigration reform than Cantor ever was — yet won his primary handily on Tuesday night.

“What I tell people is that if you put your head in the sand and say we don’t want anything done, that you’re acknowledging that you just want what we have,” Paul told reporters at the Capitol. “We have 11 million people who’ve come in here illegally over — I don’t know, the last couple of decades. If we do nothing, another 11 million comes, so I mean, doing nothing I think is really not a great answer.”

Bush, who’s still deciding whether to run and is keeping a low profile in the meantime, isn’t backing down either. “Gov. Bush’s position is clear — we have a broken, unsustainable system,” an aide said Wednesday.

Even Rubio, who quieted down quickly after taking heat from Republicans for his role in the Senate immigration reform bill, said Wednesday that he’s still a supporter.

“Immigration has never been an issue that is a politically popular one. There’s legitimate concerns about rule of law,” Rubio told reporters. “I don’t know about others, but I knew that going in. I just legitimately feel that this is an issue that is hurting America and needs to be addressed.”

A group of Republican pollsters, in a stroke of ironic timing, released a set of surveys Wednesday that showed majorities of registered voters throughout the country support immigration reform — including Republicans, and even tea party supporters. But the key, they told reporters, is that candidates have to explain what immigration reform actually is, step by step: stronger border security, employer checks to verify the legal status of their workers and then a path to legal status for immigrants who pass background checks, pay fines, learn English and wait at least 13 years.

“They have to commit time and resources to talking about it and describing what they mean,” said pollster B.J. Martino of the Tarrance Group. That way, “there’s less gray area for opponents to describe it inaccurate” — adding that there was “no indication of any strong messaging” in Cantor’s campaign.

The problem for the 2016 Republicans, though, is that a presidential primary isn’t always the best place to explain a complicated policy proposal step by step — especially when they’re up on a debate stage, with their opponents slinging dirt at them.

If they think it will be easy to explain immigration reform in a heated presidential campaign, they could take a look at President Barack Obama’s attempts to explain Obamacare in 2012 and ask him how that went. Yes, he won, but the law has never become popular even though polls show the public supports many of its individual provisions.

Or they could ask, say, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s probably going to be up on the debate stage with them.

“I have said for a long time, I think it would be a serious mistake for the House to pass an amnesty bill,” Cruz said. “Some outside observers had been pressing the House to do that; I think that would be a serious mistake. And it seems apparent that was a major issue in the election last night.”

If nothing else, some Republicans worry that the anti-immigration reform voices in the party will get louder and more shrill, turning off the Hispanic voters who might otherwise be open to GOP ideas — and making it that much harder for Republicans to win back the White House.

“The fact is that the Republican Party has a problem with Hispanics, and they have to deal with it,” said Pete Wehner, a leader of the “reform conservatives” who have been pushing the GOP to adopt new domestic policies to expand the party’s appeal.

“Their language can get corrosive at times,” Wehner said of immigration reform opponents, and it “sends a signal that they don’t just dislike illegal immigration, but immigrants in general.”

It’s not like Cantor was even beating the drum for immigration reform. He just said he might be open to some incremental measures, like giving young immigrants here illegally a shot at citizenship. And even then, he muddied the waters by distributing fliers that made him sound like he was on the other side, claiming he was fighting to stop the Senate “amnesty” plan for “illegal aliens.”

At a Wednesday news conference, Cantor insisted his position has not changed, and said he still believes that “the system is broken and needs reform” — but that it needs to be done “one step at a time.”

But even Cantor’s halfhearted push for incremental plans was perhaps enough to allow Dave Brat to bump him out of a job. And that could give second thoughts to anyone who was thinking of taking up the cause in 2016.

There’s plenty more to Cantor’s defeat than just immigration reform, of course. There’s plenty of discussion of the warning signs Cantor should have seen, and the likelihood that he hit back at Brat too hard. And RedState’s Erick Erickson blamed the defeat on “Cantor’s hubris and the arrogance of his top staffers.”